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Considering my views and thoughts about marriage, it’s easy to understand why I haven’t shared this yet. A few weeks ago I dreamed that Hennie asked me to marry him. Of all the dreams to remember it was a little scary to wake up with this one. I practised my favourite method of problem solving, the pretend-that-nothing-happened-technique, developed and perfected by the Ostrich. But I still couldn’t stop thinking about this dream. So I researched. Not to find out what it means (I don’t really buy into the whole dreams are symbols thing), but to find out what some great thinkers of our time think about dreams.

It’s a perfect technique.

At some point in our lives we’ve all believed that desires, fears and problems are what our dreams focus around. Many people may be thinking that this dream is some way of expressing my want for a marriage proposal. That line of thought comes from the same thinker responsible for the Oedipus Complex. Yup Freud is the guy behind this widely accepted belief. While we all like to think that our dreams of shagging Brad Pitt are desires we’re too scared to talk about, some dreams are in fact expressions of fear or conflict. But was my dream an expression of fear, want or a realisation that I’ve talked myself onto the idiomatic shelf? Not enough answers here.

Another great thinker, Alfred Adler doesn’t agree with Freud (phew! my dream isn’t a repressed desire). He recons that dreams are our mind’s way of making sense of goals. When we dream it is in fact to help us move towards what it is that we strive for. (Er, I didn’t see that one coming!)

From an African perpective, (since I consider myself African this could have bearing) dreams are about what is going on in one’s concrete reality. I understand this to mean that we make sense of what is going on around us while we sleep. This perspective also considers dreams to be a message or warning from the ancestors. This could be why I dreamt this in particular. Hennie had been behaving strangely and since I’ve had a question popped previously I was probably worried that it was going to happen again.

More than worrying whether it would happen again, I worried about the related bits and pieces of a marriage proposal. If he did ask me what would I say? How would I react? Would he be smart enough to ask on one of my pro-marriage days? Or would he make the fatal error of asking on an anti- day?

Unfortunately my dream gave no clues to any of these questions. I woke up before I gave my answer!